By the "social evil" is commonly understood illicit
intercourse of the sexes, a violation of law or custom
intended to regulate the procreative passion.
The "evil" is probably as old as society, coeval with
mankind. History--tradition itself--goes not back to a time
when statutes, confessedly human, or professedly divine,
were capable of controlling the fierce fires that blaze within
the blood--when all-consuming Love was cold Reason's
humble slave and Passion yielded blind obedience unto
Precept. Although the heavens have been ever peopled
with threatening gods and the great inane filled with gaping
hells; although kings and courts have thundered their
inhibitions forth, and society turned upon illicit love
Medusa's awful frown, the Paphian Venus has flourished in
every age and clime, and still flaunts her scarlet flag in the
face of Heaven.
The history of humanity--its poetry, its romance, its very
religion--is little more than a Joseph's coat, woven of Love's
celestial warp and Passion's infernal woof in the loom of
Time. For sensuous Cleopatra's smiles Mark Antony
thought the world well lost; for false Helen's favors proud
Ilion's temples blazed, and the world is strewn with broken
altars and ruined fanes, with empty crowns and crumbling
thrones blasted by the selfsame curse.
In many cities of every land abandoned women are so
numerous, despite all these centuries of law-making and
moralizing, that they find it impossible to earn a livelihood
by their nefarious trade--are driven by sheer necessity to
seek more respectable employment. The supply of public
prostitutes is apparently limited only by the demand, while
the number of "kept women" is constantly increasing, and
society becoming day by day more lenient to those
favorites of fortune who have indulged in little escapades
not in strict accord with the Seventh Commandment. It is
now a common occurrence for a female member of the
"Four Hundred" who has confessedly gone astray, to be
received back on an equality with her most virtuous sisters.
In ancient Sparta theft was considered proper, but getting
caught a crime. Modern society has improved upon that
peculiar moral code. Adultery--if the debauchee have
wealth--is but a venial fault, and to be found out a trifling
misfortune, calling for condolence rather than
condemnation. It is not so much the number of professed
prostitutes that alarms the student of sociology, as the
brutal indifference to even the semblance of sexual purity
which is taking possession of our social aristocracy, and
which poison, percolating through the underlying
strata, threatens to eliminate womanly continence
from the world.
If, despite all our safeguards of law and the restraining
force of religion, society becomes more hopelessly corrupt;
if, with our advancing civilization, courtesans increase in
number; if, with our boasted progress in education and the
arts, women of alleged respectability grow less chary of
their charms--if the necessities of poverty and the luxury of
wealth alike breed brazen bawds and multiply cuckolds--it is
a fair inference that there is something radically wrong with
our social system.
It might be well, perhaps, for priests and publicists to cease
launching foolish anathemas and useless statutes at
prostitution long enough to inquire what is driving so many
bright young women into dens of infamy,--for those good
souls who are assiduously striving to drag their fallen
sisters out of the depths, to study the causes of the disease
before attempting a cure. I say disease, for I cannot agree
with those utilitarians who profess to regard prostitution as
a "necessary evil"; who protest that the brute passions of
man must be sated,--that but for the Scarlet Woman he
would debauch the Vestal Virgin. I do not believe that
Almighty God decreed that one-half the women of this
world should be sacrificed upon the unclean altar of Lust
that the others might be saved. It is an infamous, a
revolting doctrine, a damning libel of the Deity. All the
courtesans beneath Heaven's blue concave never caused a
single son of Adam's misery to refrain from tempting, so far
as he possessed the power, one virtuous woman. Never.
Governor Fishback, of Arkansas, recently declared that
"houses of ill-fame are necessary to city life," and added:
"If you close these sewers of men's animal passions you
overflow the home and spread disaster."
This theory has been adopted by many municipalities,
courtesans duly licensed, their business legitimatized and
accorded the protection of the law. If houses of ill-fame be
"necessary to city life"; if they prevent the overflow of the
home of bestial lust and the spread of disaster, it follows as
a natural sequence that the prostitute is a public
benefactor, to be encouraged rather than condemned,
deserving of civic honor rather than social infamy. Will
Governor Fishback and his fellow utilitarians be kind
enough to make a careful examination of the quasi-
respectable element of society and inform us how large an
army of courtesans will be necessary to enable it to pass a
baking powder purity test?
Governor Fishback does not appear to have profited by
Pope's suggestion that "The proper study of mankind is
man," or he would know full well that the presence in a city
of prostitutes but serves to accentuate the dangers that
environ pure womanhood. He would know that they add
fuel to Lust's unholy fires, that thousands of them are
procuresses as well as prostitutes, and that one bad
woman can do more to corrupt her sex than can any
libertine since the days of Sir Launcelot. He would likewise
know that so perverse is the nature of man that he would
leave a harem filled with desirous houris more beautiful
than ever danced through Mohammedan dream of
Paradise, to dig pitfalls for the unwary feet of some
misshapen country wench who was striving to lead an
honest life. As a muley cow will turn from a manger filled
with new-mown hay, and wear out her thievish tongue
trying to coax a wisp of rotten straw through a crack in a
neighbor's barn, so will man turn from consenting Venus'
matchless charms to solicit scornful Dian.
What is it that is railroading so large a portion of the young
women to Hell? What causes so many to forsake
the "straight and narrow path" that is supposed to
lead to everlasting life, and seek the irremediable way of
eternal death? What mad phantasy is it that leads so many
wives to sacrifice the honor of their husbands and shame
their children? Is it evil inherent in the daughters of Eve
themselves? Is it lawless lust or force of circumstances
that adds legion after legion to the cohorts of shame? Or
has our boasted progress brought with it a suspicion that
female chastity is, after all, an overprized bauble--that what
is no crime against nature should be tolerated by this
eminently practical age? We have cast behind us the
myths and miracles, proven the absurdity of our ancestors'
most cherished traditions and brought their idols beneath
the iconoclastic hammer. In this general social and
intellectual house-cleaning have we consigned virtue to the
rubbish heap--or at best relegated it to the garret with the
spinning-wheel, hand-loom and other out-of-date trumpery?
Time was when a woman branded as a bawd hid her face
for shame, or consorted only with her kind; now, if she can
but become sufficiently notorious she goes upon the stage,
and men take their wives and daughters to see her play
"Camille" and kindred characters. This may signify much;
among other things that the courtesan is creeping into
social favor--even that a new code of morals is now
abuilding, in which she will be the grand exemplar. As
change is the order of the day, and what one age damns its
successor ofttimes deifies, who knows but an up-to-date
religion may yet be evolved with Bacchic revels for sacred
rites and a favorite prostitute for high priestess?
Were I called upon to diagnose the social disease; did any
duly ordained committee--from the numerous "Reform"
societies, Ministerial Association, secular legislatures or
other bodies that are taking unto themselves great
credit for assiduously making a bad matter worse--
call upon me for advice anent the proper method of
restoring to healthy life the world's moribund morality, I
would probably shock the souls out of them by stating a
few plain facts without troubling myself to provide polite
trimmings.
You cannot reform society from the bottom; you must begin
at the top.
Man, physically considered, is merely an animal, and the
law of his life is identical with that of the brute creation.
Continence in man or woman is a violation of nature's
edicts, a sacrifice made by the individual to the necessities
of civilization.
Like the beast of the field, man formerly took unto himself a
mate, and with his rude strength defended her from the
advances of other males. Such, reduced to the last
analysis, is the basis of marriage, of female chastity and
family honor. Rape and adultery were prohibited under
pains and penalties, and behind the sword of the criminal
law grew up the moral code. As wealth increased man
multiplied his wives and added concubines; but woman was
taught that while polygamy was pleasing to the gods
polyandry was the reverse--that while the husband was
privileged to seek sexual pleasure in a foreign bed, the wife
who looked with desiring eyes upon other than her rightful
lord merited the scorn of earth and provoked the wrath of
Heaven.
For long ages woman was but the creature of man's
caprice, the drudge or ornament of his home, mistress of
neither her body nor her mind. But as the world advanced
and matter was made more subject unto mind--as divine
Reason wrested the scepter from brute Force--woman
began to assume her proper place in the world's economy.
She is stepping forth into the garish light of freedom, is
realizing for the first time in the history of the human
race that she is a moral entity--that even she, and not
another, is the arbiter of her fate. And, as ever before,
new-found freedom is manifesting itself in criminal folly--
liberty has become a synonym for license.
The "progressive" woman--the woman who is not only well
"up-to-date," but skirmishing with the future--is asking her
brother: "If thou, why not I? If man is forgiven a score of
mistresses must woman, blessed with like reason and
cursed with kindred passions, be damned for one lover?"
And while the question grates upon her ear, the answer
comes not trippingly to the tongue. I do not mean that all
women who imagine themselves progressive are eager to
assume the same easy morals that from time immemorial
have characterized the sterner sex; but this line of
argument, peculiar to their class, while not likely to make
men better, is well calculated to make foolish women
worse. The sooner they realize that he-Dians are as
scarce in the country as brains in the head of a
chrysanthemum dude; that such sexual purity as the world
is to be blessed withal must be furnished by the softer sex,
the better for all concerned. That they will eventually cease
their altogether useless clamor that bearded men become
as modest as blushing maids, and agree with the poet that
"Whatever is, is right," the lessons of history bid us hope.
When the French people threw of the yoke of the royalist
and aristocrat they likewise loudly clamored for equality,
fraternity and other apparently reasonable but utterly
impossible things, until the bitter school of experience
taught them better. The progressive women have not yet
set up la Belle Guillotine--in Washington or elsewhere--for
the decapitation of male incorrigibles; which significant fact
confirms our old faith that the ladies rather like a man who
would not deliberately overdo the part of Joseph.
But the female "reformer," with her social board of
equalization theories, is but a small factor in that mighty
force which is filling the land with unfaithful wives and the
potter's field with degraded prostitutes.
When the people of a nation are almost universally poor,
sexual purity is the general rule. Simple living and severe
toil keep in check the passions and make it possible to
mold the mind with moral precepts. But when a nation
becomes divided into the very rich and the extremely poor;
when wilful Waste and woeful Want go hand in hand; when
luxury renders abnormal the passions of the one; and
cupidity, born of envy, blunts the moral perceptions of the
other, then indeed is that nation delivered over to the world,
the flesh and the devil. When all alike are poor,
contentment reigns. The son grows up a useful, self-reliant
man, the daughter an industrious, virtuous woman. From
this class comes nearly every benefactor of mankind. It
has ever been the great repository of morality, the balance-
wheel of society, the brain and brawn of the majestic world.
Divided into millionaires and mendicants, the poor man's
son becomes feverish to make a showy fortune by fair
means or by foul, while his daughter looks with envious eye
upon m'lady, follows her fashions and too often apes her
morals. The real life is supplanted by the artificial, and
people are judged, not by what they are, but by what they
have. The "true-love match" becomes but a
reminiscence--the blind god's bow is manipulated by brutish
Mammon. Men and women make "marriages of
convenience," consult their fortunes rather than their
affections--seek first a lawful companion with a well-filled
purse, and then a congenial paramour.
The working girl soon learns that beyond a few stale
platitudes--fired of much as a hungry man says grace--she
gets no more credit for wearing honest rags than
flaunting dishonest silks; that good name, however
precious it may be to her, is really going out of fashion--that
when the world pretends to prize it above rubies it is lying--
is indulging in the luxury of hypocrisy. She likewise learns
that the young men really worth marrying, knowing that a
family means a continual striving to be fully as fashionable
and artificial as those better able to play the fool, seek
mistresses rather than wives. She becomes discouraged,
desperate, and drifts into the vortex.
Much is said by self-constituted reformers of the
lachrymose school anent trusting maids "betrayed" by
base-hearted scoundrels and loving wives led astray by
designing villains; but I could never work my sympathies up
to the slopping over stage for these pathetic victims of
man's perfidy. It may be that my tear-glands lack a hair-
trigger attachment, and my sob-machine is not of the most
approved pattern. Perchance woman is fully as big a fool
as these reformers paint her--that she has no better sense
than a blind horse that has been taught to yield a ready
obedience to any master--to submit itself without question
to the guidance of any hand. Will the "progressive"
woman--who is just now busy boycotting Col. Breckinridge
and spilling her salt tears over his discarded drab--kindly
take a day of and tell us what is to become of this glorious
country when such incorrigible she-idiots get control of it?
It is well enough to protect the honor of children with severe
laws and a double-shotted gun; but the average young
woman is amply able to guard her virtue if she really values
it, while the married woman who becomes so intimate with
a male friend that he dares assail her continence, deserves
no sympathy. She is the tempter, not the victim. True it is
that maids, and matrons too, as pure as the white rose that
blooms above the green glacier, have been swept too far
by the fierce whirlwind of love and passion; but of
these the world doth seldom hear. The woman whose sin
is sanctified by love--who staked her name and fame upon
a cowardly lie masquerading in the garb of eternal truth--
never yet rushed into court with her tale of woe or aired her
grievance in the public prints. The world thenceforth can
give but one thing she wants, and that's an unmarked
grave. May God in his mercy shield all such from the
parrot criticisms and brutal insults of the fish-blooded,
pharisaical female, whose heart never thrilled to love's wild
melody, yet who marries for money--puts her frozen charms
up at auction for the highest bidder, and having obtained a
fair price by false pretenses, imagines herself preeminently
respectable! In the name of all the gods at once, which is
the fouler crime, the greater "social evil": For a woman to
deliberately barter her person for gold and lands, for gew-
gaws, social position and a preferred pew in a fashionable
church--even though the sale be in accordance with law,
have the benediction of a stupid priest and the sanction of
a corrupt and canting world--or, in defiance of custom and
forgetful of cold precept, to cast the priceless jewel of a
woman's honor upon the altar of illicit love?
Give the latter woman a chance, forget her fault, and she
will become a blessing to society, an ornament to Heaven;
the former is fit inhabitant only for a Hell of ice. She has
deliberately dishonored herself, her sex and the man whose
name she bears, and Custom can no more absolve her
than the pope can pardon sin. She is the most dreadful
product of the "Social Evil," of unhallowed sexual
commerce--is the child of Mammon and Medusa, the blue-
ribbon abortion of this monster-bearing age.